10/11/2004 @ 12:00AM

Where Everyone Can Overachieve

Larry Rosenstock is doing wonders with disaffected high schoolers in San Diego, the first step in a grand plan to reverse America’s failure at mass education. The nation’s richest philanthropists are lining up behind him.

As an eighth-grader at Kroc Middle School in San Diego, Sasha Knox was trouble. She would throw punches at kids and hurl vitriol at teachers. Security guards once had to drag her out of history class while the teacher stood by, sobbing. Her great-grandfather was an alcoholic. Her grandmother, on drugs, slept in the streets. Her dad had left home, and her mother, a bipolar who smoked pot three times daily, was stumbling on and off welfare.

She was the kind of kid no one bothered to save. Four years ago a friend persuaded her to attend an experimental high school called High Tech High. It’s a three-hour commute by bus and trolley each way from her shabby one-bedroom apartment in southeast San Diego to the school in Point Loma, a sun-bleached bayside community.

At High Tech, when Sasha rolled around the floor screaming, she got an arm around the shoulder and guidance. Her English teacher noticed that Sasha’s troublemaking would always start because she finished her class assignments early. So her teachers boosted the workload. For a while she had only one minute to get from class to class, with a teacher escort. “They told me it was a privilege to be here and I had to stop acting like a brat,” she says.

Sasha is a senior now. With a report card of straight As, she’s applying to Clark Atlanta University and UC, San Diego. She writes poetry and is on the prom committee and student council. She goes in on weekends to help organize data for the school’s state report card.

High Tech High has enrolled 650 kids since 2000 and produced two graduating classes, in 2003 and 2004, of 49 and 105 students, respectively. All students go to college, with 80% heading to four-year institutions (among them UC, Berkeley, Stanford, Northwestern, MIT and Johns Hopkins). Fifty-six percent were the first in their families to attend college; in some cases, the first to finish high school. Students at High Tech High test better than peers statewide. (In physics, for example, 42% reach proficiency versus 17% in California.) Everyone at High Tech graduates, too. At San Diego High only three out of four who start ever graduate.

This new school’s philosophy, put into practice every day by its principal and chief executive, Larry G. Rosenstock, is that if you treat kids like adults, even the most bruised and battered will play up to the role. There are no bells to mark class times, yet most students show up before class begins. Doors are unlocked from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. with no security guards. The only graffiti is an urban-inspired art project hanging in the school’s sunlit hallway. Kids caught with drugs or alcohol are kicked out for a full semester, but this has happened just twice in the school’s four-year existence.

Rosenstock, 56, is betting that schools like this one can work anywhere, as long as they’re kept small. Size, he says, is one of the things that doom city high schools: “These are factories, not places you want to go to learn.” Nationwide, 30%of ninth-graders drop out before graduating. One study of 2,000 big schools found a 40% dropout rate.

High schools are failing to do the two things they’re supposed to do: help families move up the economic ladder and provide skilled labor for businesses. In a survey done by Public Agenda in 2001, employers and college professors rated the majority of high schoolers fair or poor in the basics–grammar and spelling, addition and subtraction, work habits. Without a diploma, jobs are tougher than ever to come by. In the next few years 70% of the fastest-growing job categories will require education beyond high school, according to the Department of Labor. Traditionally, elementary schools got the reform dollars. High schools receive only 5% of federal funds for low-performing schools.

The small-school movement has galvanized the foundations of the wealthiest Americans, including Bill Gates, Michael Dell, the Walton family, Qualcomm’s Jacobs family and Gap’s Donald and Doris Fisher. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $647 million over the next four years to build 1,457 small high schools similar to High Tech High. Much of that money will go toward chopping up big, dysfunctional urban high schools into miniacademies. (San Diego High was split into six small schools this year.)

In four years Rosenstock has created a network of ten new urban charter schools, five in California, with others in Arizona and Illinois. Another five schools are opening in the fall of 2005, including ones in New Mexico and Massachusetts. Though these new schools will rely mostly on public funds, they’re getting $10 million of Gates’ money–$1,000 per student in each of their first three years–and will operate largely outside the rules and unions of the public system.

Like San Diego’s High Tech High, each of these schools has fewer than 500 kids and a more narrowly focused curriculum of four classes instead of the usual seven per day. Students at High Tech High often teach each other: In one calculus class the students propose their own questions and answer them in front of everyone else. Internships and group projects replace a lot of textbook reading. Twice the physics class has built a working submarine. A biology class published a 120-page field guide on San Diego’s harbor with a foreword by celebrity zoologist Jane Goodall. Rosenstock thinks this encourages a natural pull-up system, where high achievers inspire the less motivated to do better. “You can’t do the same thing the same way and expect different results,” says Rosenstock.

Each High Tech High pays Rosenstock’s organization 8% of its operating budget for a slew of services, including building management, recordkeeping, payroll accounting, audits, technical support, teacher credentials and compliance work (charter schools are required to report to ten different agencies). By some estimates, these same services in a public school system eat 21% of the budget.

But Rosenstock demands that the model not be tampered with. A prospective school in Philadelphia learned that the hard way. Its administrators wanted to track students, separating them by academic ability, a big no-no in Rosenstock’s view. “You want to transform where kids are going, not replicate where they’ve come from,” he says. The school lost its shot at a contract and now operates on its own.

San Diego’s High Tech High broke even last year on $2.6 million in revenue, even though, as a charter school, it only gets 73% of the average $8,100 per pupil of taxpayer money that San Diego public high schools get. Rosenstock hires young teachers, most of them with less than five years’ experience, and puts them on one-year contracts. There’s no football or baseball or band. Rosenstock’s salary is comparable to that of a headmaster at a private independent school.

The teachers at High Tech High have a hand in budget decisions, spurring them to look for ways to be stingy. At one Wednesday morning meeting they proposed handing out $20 Starbucks gift cards to teachers as incentives for perfect attendance, instead of spending $110 a day on substitutes.

This year High Tech High had three times as many applicants as spots available. Though it doesn’t cherry-pick the best applicants–students are selected randomly by zip codes–its student body tends to be better off than those at the toughest schools. Families with the smarts to find out about the school and the willingness to fill out the form tend to be higher on the economic ladder. Only 15% qualify for federal free lunches, compared with 40% at San Diego High. Kids willing to put up with long bus rides are likely to be motivated.

Rosenstock is in a controversial line of business. There are 3,300 charter schools in the U.S., educating 800,000 students, or 1.6% of the total enrolled in the public system. Nationwide 9% of charter schools created in the last decade have closed down, often for financial reasons. This August 60 charter schools run by an organization in Victorville, Calif. shut down, leaving thousands of students suddenly school-less. The American Federation of Teachers argues many kids in charter schools are actually worse off than those in the public system.

But Rosenstock thinks he can prove his system works with even the toughest cases, so he’s sending his students to go recruit others in churches and community centers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. He is negotiating with San Diego’s transit chief to get more bus lines aimed at High Tech High. He delves into the school’s funds to offer bus coupons, lunches and even SAT fee waivers.

His days are spent finagling for resources. For three years the San Diego school district forced High Tech High not only to forgo $190,000 in special education funding but also pay $130,000 to cover the district’s overall deficit. On top of that it had to use some iffy specialists sent by the district. One speech therapist struggled with English. “I could not understand one word this woman said, and she was claiming kids had hearing deficits,” says Rosenstock.

Rosenstock outsmarted the bureaucrats last year by joining a school district 150 miles away just for its special education funding. “The problems are never because of the kids, the problems are because of adults,” he says.

Kids knock on Rosenstock’s door all day long. He can’t walk five feet without launching stories about each of the kids he walks by. “Great kid. Came from Mexico,” he says passing a boy in the school’s big, airy entrance hall. Rounding the corner, he spots a girl with her friends and he says, “You should’ve seen her dance performance. Man, she’s got rhythm.”

Each year Rosenstock, like all his teachers, spends two weeks of afternoons schlepping to advisees’ homes. One of his was a Cambodian-Vietnamese girl who lived with eight family members in a two-bedroom apartment. The TV was constantly blaring. “That was their way of having privacy,” says Rosenstock. “I couldn’t hear myself think.” He told her to stay late after school and do her homework there. (She’s now at UC, San Diego).

Catharine Hart, an 18-year-old graduate of High Tech High (now a freshman at Cal State, Los Angeles), cruised through middle school. Her teachers didn’t check her homework, so she often just regurgitated questions in spaces left for answers. “You knew how to just get by, not be noticed too much. Its all about working the system,” she says. When she got to High Tech High, she found a system that was too intimate to disappear into. “We’re the Jewish parents these kids don’t have. We’re constantly asking them, Did you do it? Did you hand in the work?’” says arts teacher Jeffrey Robin.

A skeptic would point at High Tech High and insist it cannot be repeated. When asked how many lookalikes it would take before the original magic wore off, its school director, Benjamin Daley, throws back a question: “How many Larry Rosenstocks are there?”

As a single dad in the late 1970s, Rosenstock went to law school at Boston University, but he would skip classes to teach carpentry to kids with psychiatric problems. He eventually got his degree but continued running woodworking classes. After a few years he started to sense that the practice of segregating vocational students was shortchanging any academic potential these kids had. While in residence at the Harvard Center for Law & Education in the late 1980s, he co-wrote legislation that would redirect funding for vocational education toward classic academics. George H.W. Bush signed it into law in 1990.

Soon after, Rosenstock took the job as principal at Rindge School of the Technical Arts. He was eventually picked to run both Rindge and its sister school, Cambridge Latin, making him responsible for 2,000 students. He lasted six years. Five teachers that he had fired for poor performance ended up at other local schools within months. It took him more than a year to get rid of one teacher, who handed out sex questionnaires to 15-year-old girls. When the school board rejected his plan to merge Latin’s vocational training with traditional academics, he left.

He spent the next three years visiting 50 public high schools for a federally funded study of what makes a high school successful. “It was sobering. No one could give us nominations for great schools,” he says.

He was soon to meet another frustrated soul on the West Coast, this one with resources. Irwin Jacobs, billionaire founder of San Diego wireless technology firm Qualcomm, was struggling to hire 800 engineers a year, and had to spend thousands of dollars apiece teaching them basic communication skills. Jacobs thought the root of the problem was poor math and science training. He wanted to back a school rich in a tech curriculum, and enlisted his oldest son, Gary.

In December 1998 the Jacobses called a meeting with Rosenstock, who had moved out to San Diego to run Price Club founder Sol Price’s $75 million foundation. They talked of either opening a charter school with public money or funding one on their own. Either way it would be small and tech-focused. (This was back in the dot-com bubble of 1998.) Rosenstock couldn’t get the idea out of his head. The next morning he phoned Gary with an offer: “I’ll build it, start it, then run it.” They hurriedly penciled out Rosenstock’s contract on the back of recycled letterhead. Qualcomm pledged $100,000 a year for five years.

Rosenstock spent three months trying to find a location, eventually scoring a 105,000-square-foot former Navy training center being used as a book depot for a community college. He had to get permission from the Navy to begin construction. Gary and his wife, Jerri-Ann, donated $6 million. Irwin gave $1 million of his own money and Rosenstock got $1 million from the state.

Rosenstock set out to hire the best teachers he could find, a task he knew would be complicated. Any unionized teacher would lose precious tenure by going to High Tech High, a nonunion shop. Rosenstock tried to get around this by negotiating with the San Diego teacher’s union to create a special three-year leave of absence with full tenure if they returned to the public system. The union’s board unanimously voted down the deal. Four teachers switched camps anyway; the other eight spots went to recruits from other fields or right out of college.

For nine months the new staff labored out of two trailers in a dusty lot. It was often hot, and more often smelly–one of the portable toilets started leaking three months into the project. Good fortune brought an unexpected visitor in the spring of 2000: the Gates Foundation’s education czar Thomas Vander Ark. “I knew after ten minutes we wanted to support this guy in any way we could,” he says. A few months later the Gates Foundation pledged $1,000 per student enrolled. In July 2000 the school sent out 40,000 flyers with applications, filling the mailboxes of every eighth-grader in San Diego. The school got 1,000 applicants for 150 spots. (Competition for slots is easier now since Rosenstock no longer markets the school so widely.)

In the first year students were in class only three hours a day, with unstructured time for individual projects filling afternoons. Too many kids filled those hours socializing or playing Internet games instead of completing assignments. So the school ended the classless afternoons, filling them with project work closely attended by teachers. “We made mistakes,” says Rosenstock. “We knew what we didn’t want to be more than we knew what we wanted to be.”

But the flexibility was paradise for kids like Billy Miller. Until High Tech High, he was bored in class and tried to teach himself after school. “I read five books a week,” he says. Yearning for change (and eager to leave east San Diego’s poverty-stricken City Heights neighborhood), Billy rearranged his bedroom furniture every two weeks. Though he could have done well at any school, here he learned at a gallop. By senior year Billy was taking college-level courses at San Diego City College. He is now a freshman at MIT on a full-tuition scholarship. His mother, from Mexico, is a cashier in a tortilla factory. She sports an MIT baseball cap instead of a hair net. “She’d heard of Harvard and Stanford. I had to convince her MIT was just as good,” he says.